Principal Software Engineer

We are building a large-scale, API-first streaming platform on Apache Flink, Apache Kafka, and AWS. The platform powers near-real-time ingestion, processing, and delivery of data for many internal and product-facing use cases. Everything is exposed and governed behind well-designed APIs, and teams consume capabilities through a self-serve portal as well as programmatic interfaces. We are hiring a Principal Engineer to own architecture and technical design for this platform: from stream topology and operational model to control-plane services, developer experience, and production excellence.

This is a high-impact role with real architectural ownership - you will partner across product, platform, and data teams, mentor engineers, and raise the bar on reliability, security, and velocity.

• Architect and design the streaming platform
• Define end-to-end architecture for stream processing: ingest, stateful processing, delivery, replay, and integration with downstream systems on Flink and Kafka
• Design API-first boundaries (REST and event-driven patterns as appropriate) so streams, jobs, schemas, and operational workflows are manageable and safe at scale
• Shape multi-tenant or multi-team patterns: quotas, isolation, naming, observability, and upgrade strategies for long-running Flink workloads
• Evolve AWS-native deployment and operations (networking, IAM, scaling, resilience patterns) aligned with organizational security and compliance requirements
• Build and evolve platform surfaces
• Lead design of Spring Boot-based services that implement the platform control plane, metadata, orchestration hooks, and integration with Kafka/Flink operations
• Contribute to the self-serve portal and related UX: work with product and design and apply solid frontend engineering practices so internal users can onboard, configure, and operate without excessive manual support
• Drive developer experience: documentation, SDKs or clients where applicable, golden paths, and reducing time-to-first-successful pipeline
• Engineer for scale, reliability, and cost Define and refine SLIs/SLOs, capacity planning, back pressure handling, and failure modes for streaming workloads
• Institutionalize testing (unit, integration, contract, load) and progressive delivery for streaming jobs and services
• Champion observability: metrics, tracing, structured logging, and actionable alerting for Kafka, Flink, and surrounding services CI/CD, infrastructure, and operations Own and improve CI/CD pipelines for application code, infrastructure, and safe promotion of Flink jobs and configuration
• Partner on Infrastructure as Code, environment strategy, and operational runbooks; participate in on-call or operational escalation as appropriate for a principal (you build it, you run it mindset)
• Lead technically and collaborate Translate ambiguous requirements into clear technical strategies, RFCs, and phased execution plans Mentor engineers, lead architecture and code reviews, and align teams on standards for Java, APIs, streaming, and AWS usage Work with security, networking, and platform teams on secure-by-design streaming and API patterns

A clear, documented architecture for the streaming platform that teams can adopt without heroics Reliable, observable Kafka and Flink estates with predictable scaling and incident response APIs and self-serve flows that reduce tickets, manual operations, and time-to-production for stream owners Stronger engineering practices - CI/CD, testing, reviews - and a more capable team around you

• 10+ years of professional software engineering experience, including deep hands-on ownership of distributed systems in production
• Expert-level experience with Apache Kafka (topics, partitioning, consumer groups, reliability, operations) and Apache Flink (state, checkpoints, rescaling, fault tolerance, performance tuning) sustained production ownership, not occasional use
• Strong proficiency in Java as the primary language for large, maintainable systems
• Demonstrated experience with Spring Boot (or equivalent JVM microservices frameworks) building production APIs and services
• Hands-on AWS experience designing and operating services (compute, networking, IAM, observability patterns; familiarity with Kubernetes or managed container/orchestration patterns where the platform runs)
• Proven CI/CD experience (pipeline design, artifact promotion, testing gates) and infrastructure management (IaC concepts, environments, drift,…